Sam babbled of the pin continually. As Agnes said, whenever he got a new topic in his poor, disordered brain, he harped on it day and night. "Pinny, pin, pin," he would chant, in his sing-song way, "nice pinny, pin, pin, where are you? Where are you? Nice pinny-pin, where are you?" It was enough to drive one frantic, but Fibsy encouraged it as a means toward an end. And one day he found Sam down on his knees poking a sharp-pointed stick in between the boards of the kitchen floor. The cracks were wide in the old house, and Fibsy held his breath as he, himself unseen, watched the idiot boy diligently digging. But it amounted to nothing. After turning out many little piles of dust and dirt, Sam rose, and said, dejectedly, "No pinny-pin there! Where is it? Oh, oh, oh--_where_ is it?" Fibsy had learned the workings of the queer mind, and he was sure now that Sam had hidden the pin, but not in a floor crack. The mention of that hiding-place had been made by Sam to turn suspicion from the real one, and then the idea had stuck in his head, and, Fibsy feared, he had forgotten the true place of concealment. This would be a catastrophe, for it might then be the pin would never be found! So Fibsy stuck to his self-imposed task of standing by Sam, hoping for a chance revelation. "Go ahead," Fleming Stone told him, "do all you can with Sam. I, too, feel sure he took the pin from the chair, where Miss Clyde put it. Find the pin, Fibsy boy, find the pin, and I'll do the rest." Stone spent an entire morning in Mrs. Pell's room, going over her old letters and getting every possible light on her earlier life. He learned that she had been born and reared in a small town in Maine, that she had married and gone abroad for a stay of several years, that after that she had lived in Chicago, and for the past ten years had resided at Pellbrook. Her husband had died fifteen years ago, and left her his great fortune, mostly in precious stones. Ten years ago, when she came to Berrien, she had taken all the jewels from the bankers' and had concealed them in some place of safety which was not known to any one but herself. Her diary attested this fact, over and over again. But it gave no hint as to where the hiding-place might be. Stone pondered long and deeply over the statement that the gems were in some crypt, and, as he thought, a great inspiration came to him. "Of course!" he said to himself, "it _is_ that! It can be nothing else!" But he confided his new theory to nobody; he only began to ask more questions. He quizzed Iris as to her Chicago visit, and wanted a detailed account of every minute she had spent there. Then he asked her more particularly about the house where she was taken in the little motor car. "Let's try to find it," Stone said, "let's go now." They started off in a runabout, which Stone drove himself. Knowing that the house might be in Meadville, they went that way. Iris was unable to verify the route, so they went there on the chance.